Philosophy at Millikin is as old at the university itself. The first University President, Albert R. Taylor, taught ethics under the auspices of the Philosophy Department.  The department offered courses in both philosophy and psychology.  John Rouse joined the department in 1909. Luther Henderson assumed a newly endowed chair, Edward W. & Harriet E. Rouse Chair, in 1918 followed by James Melrose, Charles Godcharles, and Raymond Brewer.  In 1954 at the end of Brewer’s term the chair was dissolved and psychology became a separate department from philosophy. 

Our most famous alumna is certainly Alice Ambrose Lazerowitz. (Dr. Jacobs wrote a remembrance for her memorial at Smith College and Fred Mosedale wrote a piece for the Decaturian.) In 1928, she was the first student to graduate from Millikin with a straight A average. Alice received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin in 1932. In 1932, she traveled to England to do post-doctoral research at Cambridge University, studying under perhaps the most important philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Alice received a second doctoral degree from Cambridge, and in 1935 she left England and accepted a teaching position at the University of Michigan, which she held for two years. In 1937, she went to Smith College and, along with her husband Morris Lazerowitz, whom she married in 1938, spent the remainder of her career in the Smith Philosophy Department. After her death in 2001 she left Millikin the funds that now endow the Alice Ambrose Lazerowitz Prize in Philosophy.